Opera 10 has been released as an alpha preview. It showcases a new rendering engine, Presto 2.2, which the company states will improve browsing performance over the previous version by 30 percent, and notably passes Acid3 standards compatibility with a 100 out of 100 score. This article runs it through some benchmarks, checks memory usage, and general browsing experience.

Yes, the search function is also available, just like in Firefox. Either "/" or "."

In fact, one of the main reasons why I USE Opera is the search feature. The best thing is having short abbreviations for any search engine I want and using them inside the address bar. No need for that "search box" anymore. And the fact that you can define them by yourself is really the best thing I ever saw. Of course Firefox has it too, but guess who's been the first again

That would be Konqueror. Web shortcuts and searching via the addressbar have been available for years.

And IE6 had it as well. Not sure about IE5.

Can't remember if FF 1.x had this or not. I do remember using it in Konq before FF 1.0 was released, though.